Pubdate: Fri, 04 Aug 2000
Source: Salon.com (US Web)
Copyright: 2000 Salon.com
Contact:  22 4th Street, 16th Floor San Francisco, CA 94103
Fax: (415) 645-9204
Feedback: http://www.salon.com/contact/letters/
Website: http://www.salon.com/
Forum: http://tabletalk.salon.com/
Author: Gary Kamiya
Note: Gary Kamiya is Salon's executive editor.

WRITING HIGH

In "Writing On Drugs," Sadie Plant Embarks On A Stimulating Trip Into
Literature's Strangest, Smokiest Den.

August 04, 2000 -- At first glance, "Writing on Drugs" would seem to have 
as much chance of success as a guy in a three-piece suit hawking cases of 
Jim Beam at a Grateful Dead concert.

As anyone who has ever tried to write anything after partaking of 
psychoactive substances knows, altered states of consciousness go into 
words the way a tsunami goes into a squirt gun. Your synapses may be firing 
like Gatling guns, your mind may be soaring through the empyrean, but what 
you succeed in getting down on paper are incoherent gestures, endless 
digressions and fragments of fragments.

And even when a writer, through discipline, talent or stoned luck, manages 
to capture something of the experience, who would want to read it? If 
you're (as the late drug authority Jimi Hendrix delicately put it) 
"experienced," why settle for a mere verbal representation of the real thing?

And if you're not, why bother with descriptions of an experience you're 
axiomatically cut off from understanding?

But Sadie Plant manages to make her subject compelling. In large part, this 
is because she is intelligently agnostic about almost everything relating 
to drugs: She avoids falling into the almost inevitable banality that 
attends either Timothy Leary-style cheerleading or know-nothing moralizing. 
The fact that she doesn't exactly deliver on her book's title also helps 
her. "Writing on Drugs" does provide highlights from the extensive 
literature on drugs, but it incessantly meanders away onto other subjects, 
from the way that certain drugs reflect the obsessions of their eras to the 
possibility that broom-sitting witches absorbed psychoactive drugs through 
their vaginal membranes to the hypocrisy and self-defeating nature of 
assorted wars on drugs.

This somewhat invertebrate, not to say dazed and confused, approach 
prevents Plant from getting caught in the epistemological quagmires that 
trap those given to making sweeping theoretical pronouncements about drugs.

But it also gives "Writing on Drugs" a free associative, at times anarchic, 
feeling that sometimes recalls, it must be said, certain conversations 
carried out in the shadow of the spliff. (This may be an occupational 
hazard of immersing oneself in drug writing, a kind of literary contact 
high.) As with those conversations, this is only intermittently a good thing.

One wishes that Plant had pursued some of her suggestive ideas and themes 
more exhaustively and with greater rigor.

Fortunately, however, she's a smart and lively enough writer that most of 
the time, you don't mind her flitting.

The book opens with a brief, autobiographical prelude that recalls an 
opium-fueled reverie in Thailand. Aside from this bit of poetic 
semi-confession, Plant does not divulge the extent of her own drug use, 
although her descriptions of the effects of ecstasy seem unusually vivid. 
This reticence is understandable: As she tersely notes, "Drugs take all 
authority away." (Still, it would not seem amiss, in this exploration of 
the most subjective of literary genres, for the author to come clean about 
her own experiences and what they have meant to her.)

Plant begins her tour in the 19th century, in the golden age of drug 
writing, when writers like De Quincey, Coleridge and Baudelaire encountered 
opium. "There is something about opium, with all its varied properties and 
histories, that allows this drug to set the scene," she writes, quoting 
Jean Cocteau as saying "Of all drugs, opium is the drug." These artists' 
experiences with opium encapsulate the dichotomies attached to all drug 
use: The ecstatic visions and shattering insights of the drug experience 
vs. the enervation, depression and sense of flatness that can follow; the 
persistent sense that neither reality nor the self is fixed -- a radically 
relativistic doctrine that Nietzsche called perspectivism -- vs. the 
equally strong sense that beneath the shifting veils lies one reality; the 
literally self-preserving impulse toward caution and measure, what Rimbaud 
called "a rational derangement of the senses" vs. Artaud's Dionysian call 
for complete surrender to the unknown.

Cocaine, which followed opium, played an opposite social role, Plant 
argues, engaging people with the speeded-up world they had tried to escape 
by chasing the dragon. "If opiates had provided De Quincey's generation 
with a means of escaping the ravages of the mechanical age, coca and 
cocaine woke everyone up to an era humming with new distributions of power 
and new forms of mass communication," she writes.

Some of the more entertaining passages of "Writing on Drugs" recall the 
grandiose health claims made by manufacturers and the medical establishment 
alike for cocaine, which was extolled as a supreme boon to health, vigor 
and happiness.

Products like "Peruvian Wine of Coca" and "Vin Mariani" were said to 
fortify and refresh the body and brain. The architect who designed the 
Statue of Liberty raved that "Vin Mariani seems to brighten and increase 
all our faculties; it is very probable that had I taken it 20 years ago, 
the Statue of Liberty would have attained the height of several hundred 
meters." A high achievement indeed.

Plant lingers over the case of Coca-Cola, whose "every bottle once 
contained the equivalent of a small, but respectable, line of cocaine." 
After cocaine's luster wore off, the "company feigned amnesia about cocaine 
and denied that its drink ever had a drug connection ... But Coca-Cola 
would be nowhere if coca had not kicked it into life." What replaced that 
"respectable line of cocaine"? Nothing less than our era's own peculiar 
addiction, advertising: "In effect, the drink became a virtual cocaine, a 
simulated kick, a highly artificial paradise.

Twentieth-century culture learned much from this sleight of invisible hand."

One of Plant's more audacious claims is that cocaine had a major influence 
on the creation of psychoanalysis. It's well known that Sigmund Freud used 
cocaine, but Plant reveals that he just loved the stuff.

The good doctor raved about "the stimulative effect of coca on the 
genitalia" and in a letter to his fiancee, Martha, "forewarned her of the 
pleasure she could expect from 'a wild man with cocaine in his body'" -- 
revealing him, interestingly, to be not just the father of psychoanalysis 
but a precursor of gangsta rap. Freud took cocaine to cure his tendency 
towards debilitating depression and restore what he called "the normal 
euphoria of the healthy person." When its drawbacks finally became apparent 
to him, he looked about for a replacement and found the talking cure. "What 
began as his own search for a drug-free cure, some new method to occupy his 
mind, became a drug-replacement therapy for everyone.

Analysis was Freud's 'natural' high."

Plant also looks at hashish, speed, LSD, mescaline, ecstasy and peyote, 
among other drugs.

In a huge omission, she fails to discuss Jean-Paul Sartre, whose 
experiences with mescaline inspired "Nausea," the novel that gave a 
popular, if weird, spin to phenomenology. In fact, she pretty much ignores 
contemporary fiction and the effect drugs have had on it, implying that the 
most important developments were avant-garde dead-ends like William S. 
Burroughs' "cut-up" technique.

This is unfortunate: Burroughs' evocation of the drug universe remains 
unsurpassed, but the novels of writers like Denis Johnson and Robert Stone, 
to pick just two, are worthy of exploration as well.

Her analysis of LSD, arguably the most influential psychoactive drug in the 
contemporary developed world, is strong on history, in particular the story 
of the drug's creation, but comparatively weak on its effect on the '60s 
generation. Her sociological scene-setting falls into unenlightening 
cliches: "LSD challenged all accepted notions of sanity, normality and 
identity, presenting itself as a solution to the madness and alienation of 
... 'bomb culture,' an era that believed it was about to disappear into a 
mushroom cloud and was filled with demands for total revolution." This 
passage reveals the shortcomings of Plant's attempt to fit drugs like LSD 
into a larger social context.

While her thumbnail sketches of historical eras aren't wrong, they feel 
both inadequate and worse, irrelevant. The unruly, explosive subjectivity 
of drug experiences simply swamps attempts to give them epistemic meaning.

By the time Plant gets to postmodern French theorists like Deleuze and 
Guattari and Michel Foucault (who would without a doubt be the scariest 
person in history with whom to crack open a vial of nitrous), her book's 
emphasis has shifted from literary descriptions of drug experiences to 
philosophies informed by a drug ethos, ideologies that aspire to a 
drug-like state of paradox, self-transcendence and mobility.

The Foucauldean cast of her thought becomes clear: When she asserts that 
"even the most sober individual lives in a world in which drugs have 
already had profound effects," one of the things she means is that "the 
confinement of drugs has also produced and multiplied the thrills it 
chased" -- a classic Foucault move, in which prohibition and repression 
create the very pleasures they seek to forbid.

At other times, Plant seems to hint that drugs are actually responsible for 
modern culture.

She speaks of the "dilemmas, contradictions, tensions, splits, writ large 
in the two-faced spectacle of a culture at war with the very stuff that 
kicked it into life." Just how drugs kicked modern culture into life, 
however, is never explained.

Indeed, she advances other arguments that seem to contradict this. Plant 
astutely points out that the entire Enlightenment was opposed to everything 
drugs represented:

If the witch-hunters drew the lines around life and death and put an end to 
return trips to the outer edges of the life-death border zone, these were 
parameters confirmed and solidified by the institutions of the modern 
state. Women were no longer allowed to heal the sick or deliver children; 
all drugs were now entrusted to the care of the Enlightenment's new 
fraternity; and the shamanic narrative of flight, transformation, and 
return was abandoned in favor of a new sense of linear time. Now all the 
stories were supposed to go one way: progress, forward movement, full speed 
ahead.

Plant goes on to point out that modernity has never been "really free from 
its own shamanic past." And she could argue, I suppose, that modern 
culture's radical discontinuities and dizzying gulfs are a result of the 
clash between the linear Enlightenment narrative and the circular 
drug-inspired one. She doesn't actually make that argument, and wisely so: 
It can't be sustained. The fact is that drugs have a far greater impact on 
individuals, in the modern world, than they do on societies.

In our rational, Apollonian world, Dionysius is pretty much off in a grape 
bower getting high by himself. (Or at most, spinning techno at raves.)

After a side trip into neuroscience and biochemistry, in which she points 
out the chemical relationship between drugs and the pleasure-giving 
substances manufactured by the body, Plant concludes with a restrained but 
withering account of the longstanding attempts to regulate psychoactive 
substances -- attempts that have not only always failed, but have made the 
problems worse. "The war on drugs displays more excitement, confusion and 
paranoia than the drugs themselves," she writes.

Her account is damning, but one wishes she had confronted the issue of 
legalization directly.

If she believes that it is a better solution, as it would seem she might, 
she should argue for it.

Plant eschews Grand Theories and keeps herself in the background, but by 
the end of "Writing on Drugs," the basic contours of her opinions are clear.

She believes that the use of psychoactive drugs is an integral, permanent 
part of the human condition, found in all cultures going back thousands of 
years, and that attempts to demonize that experience are both simplistic 
and doomed. Metaphysically and epistemologically, she is an agnostic: Drugs 
are part of reality, and so the familiar moralist's slogan that they are 
radically "other" is simply wrong. "Psychoactive drugs defy all easy 
distinctions between organic and synthetic substances, natives and aliens 
at work in a nervous system that is always predisposed to receive them," 
she writes. "Their introduction may disturb the equilibrium of the human 
brain, but they change the speeds and intensities at which it works rather 
than its chemicals and processes." But, of course, changing "speeds and 
intensities" (Plant points out that the very word "intensify" was coined by 
Coleridge to describe his opium experiences) can cause you to crash and 
burn, too.

Plant is equally even-handed on the subject of the validity of what one 
learns or sees on drugs.

The experience can be enlightening, even revelatory, but it can also be 
extremely dangerous -- sometimes both simultaneously. The effects of drugs, 
she writes, have to be "taken on their own terms." There is no master 
narrative, no single type of "right" thinking, no ultimately "normal" 
consciousness. A world with drugs in it is a stranger, but more 
interesting, world than one without them. "Writing on Drugs" captures that 
truth, and in this unusually hysterical age, it's one worth remembering.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Terry Liittschwager